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Super Blade
12:00 AM EST Mon. Feb. 25, 2008
From the February 25, 2008 issue of CRN
Page 2 of 4
At startup, with only the power supplies on and the blade servers off, Test Center meters registered 183 watts with 89dB of sound. When we turned on the two AMD-based blades, it measured 750 watts of power and 90dB of sound. With all four blades running at once, power consumption rose to 1,075 watts and the noise level stayed steady. Turning the servers back off, the enclosure used 54 watts and the sound dropped to 70dB. After running for about two hours, its temperature measured 74 degrees Fahrenheit.
Noisewise, we had the system in the same room running off and on for several consecutive days while we went about our business testing other products. For the most part, it was fine, although it's not the solution you'd want for a public area such as a retail location or a walk-in insurance office. It's strictly a data center solution.
Network News
Initial deployment was briefly interrupted because the software management and configuration console needed to be accessed at the device itself—and couldn't be accessed remotely on the network at first.
Despite problems starting the Super Micro SuperBlade server, the Web management console proved to be extremely helpful. The Test Center did not have to resort to direct level access with a KVM switch. The management console's workspace includes all of the services required to control the blades. The console even supports remote power supply shutdowns, blade graceful shutdowns, power consumption metering, policy-based alert settings and system health logs.
SuperBlade supports dynamic DNS. By default, the server comes with dyndns.org server. Since dyndns works over any port, this is useful for VARs and remote administrators that need access to the box and don't want to set up remote connections.
VARs can purchase or install a SuperBlade with either Gigabit or InfiniBand switches. As tested, the SuperBlade in the CMP lab was configured with one Gigabit switch. Test Center reviewers first set up the Gigabit switch to work with DHCP, which turned the IP address, subnet and gateway into zeros. It was not possible to get into the switch with DHCP on. We kept static IP in the management console.
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